Diaspark White Paper July 2010 Microsoft SharePoint 2010 INSIGHT Business Intelligence on a technically enriched platform

Transcription

1 Diaspark White Paper July 2010 Microsoft SharePoint 2010 INSIGHT Business Intelligence on a technically enriched platform

2 Contents Executive Summary... 3 Who should read this paper?... 3 SharePoint 2010 An Insight... 4 Insights in SharePoint Microsoft Excel... 5 The Power Pivot... 5 Excel Services... 6 Visio Services... 6 Performance Point Services/Dashboards/Scorecards... 7 Know more interesting things... 8 Business Connectivity Services... 8 Conclusion... 10

3 Executive Summary With this paper, Diaspark initiates a series of white papers in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Business Intelligence. According to Gartner Group, Business Intelligence is still an area where considerable investment is being made by companies to maximize their investments and get the most return. In SharePoint 2010, Microsoft has added numerous Business Intelligence features specifically designed for wide adoption by Business users. The high usability of Business Intelligence makes it essential for SharePoint practitioners in any company to learn the new features offered by INSIGHT; Business Intelligence platform on Microsoft The purpose of this document is to help readers understand the various components of Business Intelligence roadmap from a SharePoint perspective. It will arm BI decision makers and SharePoint implementers with the relevant information to prepare for a rollout of a Strong Business Intelligence Solution around SharePoint WHO SHOULD READ THIS PAPER? This whitepaper is aimed at decision makers, IT experts, or anyone interested in learning how SharePoint 2010 Insight enabling BI can impact their business. The information contained in this document represents the current view of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 as of the date of publication. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Diaspark cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication Diaspark Inc This white paper is for informational purposes only. WE MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT 3

4 SharePoint 2010 An Insight Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is The Business Collaboration Platform for the Enterprise & the Web that enables you to connect & empower people through an integrated and rich set of features that can be deployed in an Intranet, Extranet or Internet-facing solutions. This enables businesses to meet growing demands for internal and external collaboration and meet the fast-changing requirements of the new world of business knowledge transfer, support for the next-generation workforce, virtual teams, open innovation, collaboration with partners and customers, and more with a single, extensible, centrally managed enterprise platform. SharePoint 2010 helps you to: Empower business users with self serving capabilities to: Create, access and analyze the information Share the most relevant metrics to translate strategy into action and bring accountability Easily find and work with structured and unstructured information using favorite Word, Excel, PowerPoint tools within the same environment Augment your Information Technology platform with SharePoint The wealth of features includes: Collaboration using Excel-Services that converts simple Microsoft Office Excel workbook into a single, sharable, secured and managed workbook throughout the enterprise. Creating Dashboards using new chart Web Parts. Creating Balanced Scorecards that display strategy v/s operations using performance point services in highly interactive and dynamic dashboards. 4

5 INSIGHT Business Intelligence SharePoint 2010 Unlike other solutions, SharePoint 2010 provides the most integrated, accessible and user-friendly BI solution in the market today. INSIGHT in SharePoint 2010 brings a number of robust offerings, including: Microsoft Excel The most users friendly Database by the business users, is still the power of Excel. Though, Excel isn t a database in technical pure definition but this is the most commonly used database in the world. Our business users including the technology guys have been crafting up very compelling excel sheets with the tons of logic inside. One of the good thing MS SharePoint team did was, to keep the office clients (Word, Excel, Outlook etc) intact with the Server itself. The reasons are obvious Good for Quick ad-hoc reports. And, now with the 64-bit-Excel, handling very large datasheets is quite smooth. The Excel empowers the BI solution when coupled with PowerPivot and Excel Services running over SharePoint Server. The Power Pivot The PowerPivot add-in is an extension to Excel that adds support for large-scale data. Think of this as Excel with the ability to deal with very large amount of data. It has an in-memory data store as an option for Analysis services. The PowerPivot add-in for Excel running over a SharePoint BI dashboard aggregates computational data using Excel 2010 with charts and scorecards. A compelling self-service BI solution, facilitates Sharing and Collaboration on usergenerated BI using Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 environment. More about Gemini Power Pivot - 5

6 Excel Services If the business users and IT personnel are dealing with sharing excel sheets with a larger number of people, while maintaining control/version control etc. then Excel Service is a blessing for sharing logic embedded in excel sheets with other software across the organization via REST/ SOAP interfaces Excel Services makes it simple to use, share, secure, and manage Microsoft Office Excel 2007 workbooks as interactive reports in a consistent way throughout a company. Excel Services is a Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 shared service that brings the power of Excel to SharePoint Server by providing server-side calculation and web browser-based rendering of Excel workbooks. Thus, excel sheets can be created by end users, and published to SharePoint server which are then rendered right through the web browser in read-only or parameterized-read-only modes. They can also be accessed by other software via SOAP or REST based APIs. IT team: Logical and complex formulae can be embedded and programmed in the excel sheets. Business Users: End business users can build such solutions once tech staff has setup excel services on a SharePoint server instance. *Excel Services gels well with the PerformancePoint Services, Excel, and PowerPivot. Visio Services How about showing data as diagrams - with live updates? Visio Services in SharePoint 2010 provides the capability to render Visio diagrams and charts within the browser. Business users can use one of the existing out-ofthe-box filter Web Parts to apply filtering criteria to a diagram to restrict what to be and not to be rendered. Visio Services is a shared service on the Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 platform that allows users to share and view Visio diagrams that may or may not have data connected to them. Connected data can update these diagrams allowing a visual/graphical view into the data. The rendering can be using Microsoft Silverlight and can be converted into to.png formats. 6

7 Performance Point Services/Dashboards/Scorecards Performance Point Server (PPS) has made an impressive and worthwhile come back in the developers and business users world.it was a question of redesign and restructuring all hard work with respect to visualize the data easily and quickly as PPS was supposed to do. Now, PerformancePoint Services is a balanced scorecard and dynamic dashboard tool that allows power users/it to create dynamic and highly interactive dashboards which display information from strategy to operations. Using these you have the ability to create dashboards, scorecards/kpis, and simple reports You can also create reports targeting hierarchical multidimensional data sources. The visual decomposition tree is a new report type that lets you quickly breakdown multidimensional data PerformancePoint Services in SharePoint 2010 is now fully integrated with SharePoint, and comes with features that can either be used in the BI center site definition, or on their own as activated features in existing site collections. Performance Point service allows you to build reports and dashboards that target a variety of back-end data sources including: SQL Server reporting services, SQL Server analysis services, SharePoint lists, excel services, simple tables, etc. 7

8 Know more interesting things Chart Web Parts Interact with data, slice and dice key performance indicators and analytics, and create your own dashboards using excel or the new chart Web Parts. Status Indicator Lists Status Indicator Lists now contain rich Key Performance Indicator (KPI) details highlighting ownership, date stamps, and thresholds providing complete transparency into key strategic initiatives and processes. Reporting Services SQL Server reporting services can integrate with SharePoint, allowing you to store reports and data sources in SharePoint document libraries, and render these reports and associated functionality such as subscriptions through a SharePoint site. In SharePoint 2010, you can also write reports for SharePoint lists Relevant technologies to know about: Business Connectivity Services Business Connectivity Services allows consumption of external data in SharePoint as columns or external lists. This can be paired with one or more of the above BI offerings allowing insight into such data. Below is a snapshot of a live solution showing real time integration between Microsoft Dynamic CRM and SharePoint Lists using the Business Connectivity Model in SharePoint 2010 BI. The Operation was both ways getting and storing information to and from CRM and SharePoint. This gave a sudden leverage to the business as well as IT users to quickly adopt this without being bothered about creating, storing and maintaining multiple data storage or products. 8

9 Building the BCS 9

10 Conclusion SharePoint 2010 s INSIGHT capabilities help companies manage and access both structured and unstructured data. Efficient data consumption saves time and money Save time each day sifting through data Information cannot be consumed and used efficiently if it is difficult to find By leveraging SharePoint 2010 s capabilities across Discoverability, Collaboration, Self Service, Insight Formation, and Data Access, all users can effectively drive, manage, share, and create insights for their aspect of the business with a single, integrated Business Intelligence solution. Start Visualizing Your Data! USA - Edison - Corporate Office 200 Metroplex Drive, Edison, NJ, Tele: Ext Fax: USA - New York Office 333, 7th Avenue, New York, NY, Tele: India - Indore - Global Delivery Centre Labh-Ganga Building,Indore, Tele: Fax: Diaspark Inc This white paper is for informational purposes only. WE MAKE NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT 10